Out of the closet, into the bed

Mark Sanderson reviews My Lives
by Edmund White.

Mark Sanderson

12:01AM BST 25 Sep 2005

Although Edmund White is HIV positive, the riskiest thing about going to bed with him (and it is clear from this no-holds-barred memoir that lots of men do; especially if he pays them) - is that your most intimate details - your dimensions, your distinctions and your defects - will sooner or later be writ large for all to see. He is aware that his candour may be off-putting: "I can imagine some of my friends reading this and muttering, 'TMI -Too Much Information,' or 'Are we to be spared nothing? Must we have every detail about these tiresome senile shenanigans?'" It's as if he is still celebrating the freedom to be gay, to be out of the closet and to be outspoken. If that means betraying your lovers, so be it.

Born in 1940, the Cincinnati kid grew up in the conformist, constricting era of Eisenhower. His parents divorced when he was seven. Rather than follow a traditional, chronological narrative line, White tells the story of his life in 10 chapters, each one devoted to a particular person, or group of people, who has had a profound effect upon him. They range from "My Shrinks" to "My Friends" by way of "My Hustlers" and "My Blonds". The most substantial and most shocking chapters, despite their lack of pornographic close-ups, are those concerning his mother and father. His disloyalty to the pair of "impoverished rural Texans unprepared for the world they'd created for themselves by earning money and moving North" makes his portraits of them all the more devastating.

Edmund Valentine White the second was, says his son (EVW the third), "one of the most boring men ever to draw breath". He was a broker of chemical equipment who worked all night, slept all day, and chain-smoked cigars. He disapproved of his daughter's choice of husband so neither paid for, nor attended, her wedding. His son's sissiness appalled him. After the divorce - not that surprising when it is revealed that his wife refused to have sex with him - he took up with his secretary.

The split affected Lila Mae White, a child psychologist, greatly. She took to drink and took her "genius" son with her on dates with unsuitable men. White charts her descent into alcoholism and madness with unblinking attention: "Her belly was a swollen water melon under her girdle, her face resembled that of a squalling infant creased, nearly toothless, red." Thirty years on, White's exasperation and embarrassment are as acute as ever. The love he once felt for his parents still endures but it seems he does not care to speak its name.

The author is just as hard on himself. The picture he paints is not a pretty one: "old, fat, winded, impotent most of the time, hairy with big breasts and a small dick". He goes on and on about male beauty and what he likes to do when he gets his hands on it. His prose never fails to rise to the occasion.

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There are dozens of startling images: a sailor's manhood in Marseilles "radiated as much heat as bread fresh from the oven." However, the lasciviousness often shades into lyricism: "I had total access to this superb animal, his high arched feet and uncalloused toes, his full, packed calves and long, cantilevered thighs, the mounded hips and narrow waist flaring up into the triangle of muscle suspended from the wide kite bar of his shoulders."

White has always been an autobiographical writer. His third novel, for example, A Boy's Own Story (1982), a genuine landmark in gay literature, tells the tale of a precocious pupil who seduces his teacher before betraying him to the authorities. My Lives features many of the men who unwittingly provided White with templates for his characters. He sees his fiction as "something like stitching quilts which are made out of used and faded materials". No wonder, when he spends so much time in bed. His experiences of the battle for gay liberation, the horrors of the Aids epidemic, his love of Genet and France, his early struggles to get published and his constant wrestling with the nature of masculinity (and willing jocks) will already be familiar to his legion of fans.

At one point, decoding the classified ad "VGL XXX horny dominant top WS, FF, C&B torture, BB, verbal" (don't ask), White refers to his "few heterosexual readers". He is such a good writer he deserves to be read by everyone other than the many straights who would find his explicitness difficult to stomach.

He may have a "dotty way of talking (all ellipses and insinuations, childlike piping or matronly swooping)" but he does not mince his words. He has made a career out of saying it like it is. To sugar-coat reality for the sake of extra royalties, to prostitute his art, would be the ultimate betrayal.